Can ICC get a fix on credibility?

Though no cricketer is named in ‘The Munawar Files’, the documentary casts doubt on the integrity of the sport’s entire managerial infrastructure.

On August 27 this year, the International Cricket Council tweeted four grainy pictures of Aneel Munawar, a suspected match-fixing agent, and asked the public for help in tracking him down. This strange manhunt was prompted by an Al Jazeera documentary, The Munawar Files, which became available for public viewing this week.

The outpouring of click-bait may have led many to believe that the core of the problem is that Munawar found ways to get photographed with some of the world’s most famous cricketers, including Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli. This in itself means nothing, as anyone who’s ever taken a chance on a lucky snap with a celebrity knows. (Munawar is allegedly linked to Dawood Ibrahim, but the ICC tweet was probably the first time most people in the world got a look at his face.)

The Munawar investigation throws up allegations of wrongdoing by cricketers playing for England, Australia, Pakistan “and one other”, and casts doubt on the outcome of a number of international matches, across formats, played in 2011-12. But the channel has not named a single suspect, in the documentary or since. More puzzlingly, while the film ends with reporters promising cooperation with Interpol, the cricket boards in question and the ICC claim that the channel has not shared any evidence with them.

Said evidence includes a long secretly recorded meeting with Munawar himself, as well as records of phone calls between Munawar and the bookie Dinesh Khambhat, in which Munawar tips ‘DK’ off on the outcome of a number of passages of play. The reporters have had Munawar’s claims of influencing outcomes independently assessed, and say the likelihood of premeditation is near-irrefutable.

No board member or manager is directly implicated in these claims, but the refusal to cooperate with administrative inquiries implies that the filmmakers don’t just doubt players or a few bad eggs, but the integrity of cricket’s whole managerial infrastructure. The guilt of individual players is potentially more shocking. But that may yet be refuted by sceptics, who can choose to disbelieve the claims until a more open inquiry is held, or who find Munawar’s operation tenuous and circumstantial.

Cricket can afford to let its fans coast on the latter hope. Perhaps it is hoping that its own institutional reputation won’t matter to anyone except spoilsports. But it’s difficult not to see this as a genuine symptom of the sport’s long-running crisis of credibility. Some have offered a ‘put or shut up’ defence of the sport, implying that Al Jazeera’s filmmakers have found cricket an easy target for a splashy controversy.

This may be true, and the film does not help its case by holding back the names of suspects because of the ‘gravity’ of the claim — surely the graver the claim, the more transparent the process of investigation. Nor can anyone say that the ICC has been lax about creating a solid rulebook, and throwing it at miscreants.

Yet there’s something depressingly familiar about this whole sordid tale, starting from its roots in South Asia’s large illegal betting networks. It may be an aberration, but the repetitive phone calls between fixer and bookie — Munawar often told ‘DK’ to open bets on passages of play that would be ‘manda,’ or low-scoring — just seem like the rebooted soundtrack of an old gangster movie.

Even if cricket is nothing more than entertainment now, its ringmasters can’t bank on the idea that spectators will never care about who really controls the narrative. If, on the other hand, it still lays claim to the values and mores of a sport, its managers surely understand that addressing claims like those in The Munawar Files isn’t a side job, but at the core of what they do.

This, arguably, is the main reason why those photographs with Kohli and Sharma and cricket’s other big men should matter not to the athletes themselves, but to the ICC. It occasions the question of how Munawar got close enough to these and other cricketers at all, when the ICC knew of his alleged match-fixing as far back as 2010.

We now know that ICC investigators knew of Munawar’s operations nearly a decade ago, when The Sun newspaper involved them in a matchfixing investigation. We also know that the council stationed inspectors at tournaments to assess whether cricketers were being contacted by fixers. If a step so serious couldn’t prevent them from closing off access to the man for whom they requested an international search party on Twitter, what does it say about their investigative capacity? Munawar, who is now untraceable, would call it ‘manda.’ It’s grim to contemplate that he might be right.

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